Dalligate affair resurrected in claims by Dutch inmate who taped Melvin Theuma

Maltese police have been given information about a Dutch scam artist incarcerated in the Netherlands, about services he rendered to Silvio Zammit, the restaurateur implicated in the Dalligate affair.

In 2015, at the age of just 16 and on the run from justice in the Netherlands, Julian Hofstra found himself in Malta with the cash he made on a raft of internet and affiliate marketing scams.

But his notoriety appears to have been known to Silvio Zammit, according to information given to the police, who are investigating recordings Hofstra made during his Maltese jaunt of Melvin Theuma – the middleman in the Caruana Galizia assassination whom he befriended during his extended stay at the Portomaso Hilton.

Bizarre? According to these latest claims, Hofstra met Zammit at a Maltco lotteries outlet in Sliema, where the two struck up a friendship – just as Hofstra would have done with the unguarded Theuma.

Police were told that Zammit realised Hofstra’s computer skills could be useful to him, specifically over a cache of email exchanges that took place between 2013 and 2015, to have their timestamps changed to 2008 or 2009,

According to information known to the police, the emails allegedly dealt with the John Dalli affair, in which the former Nationalist minister was forced to resign as European Commissioner in October 2012 after an anti-fraud investigation found Zammit had solicited a multi-million bribe to influence anti-tobacco laws.

Zammit denied the allegations in a comment to MaltaToday, querying why after having been charged in 2012 on the back of the OLAF investigation, he would have gone through the trouble of tampering emails. Zammit also said he never sent Hofstra any emails. “Hofstra worked in the vicinity of the lotto booth I managed, from where he purchase lotto tickets.”

The allegations prompted, as expected, a vehement reaction from Dalli himself, who called them “completely baseless”.

“As usual, this mudslinging is timed to court decisions expected from the European Court of Justice, that is to decide my appeal from the surreal sentence handed down some months ago; and from the court of first instance in Belgium, to decide on yhe indictment of Giovanni Kessler and Swedish Match after the Belgian Police investigated my complaint for defamation and started the judicial process against them.

“This is no coincidence and point to the conspiracy of the corrupt media in Malta and [former EU anti-fraud agency OLAF director] Giovanni Kessler. The latter has been protected by the Commission from any scrutiny of his illegal actions.  And even when the European General Court ruled that the immunity given to him should not have been reinstated after being lifted, the Commission did not take any action after such a decision.”

Theuma recordings

These latest allegations are perhaps the strangest to emerge since the first reports about Hofstra, 21, and his recordings of Melvin Theuma.

Hofstra, now in a Dutch penitentiary shared recordings he made of Theuma allegedly speaks of his fear of Keith Schembri and retribution by the former chief of staff to prime minister Joseph Muscat.

Lawyers of Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech, the man accused of being the mastermind of the assassination, travelled to Amsterdam to listen to the recordings captured by the one-time fugitive from justice, a teenage scam artist who spent a few years in Malta staying at the Hilton.

In these recordings, Theuma would have confided to Hofstra that he feared for his life, namedropping Keith Schembri and his interest in the Caruana Galizia investigation.

Hofstra, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison last October, walked right into the timeline of the Caruana Galizia investigation after striking up some sort of friendship with Theuma, who ran the lucrative white-taxi stand outside the Hilton Portomaso, and was on speaking terms with the then-teenager.

Hofstra had ran away from the Netherlands to Malta in 2016 with thousands in cash he made in an affiliate-marketing scam. It is believed Theuma confided in the Dutch teen – a fixture at Portomaso as he burnt through the cash he amassed from a series of internet cons – and blurted out his concerns about his fate at the hands of Keith Schembri.

Late last year Hofstra was found guilty by a Dutch court of having scammed unsuspecting victims by posing as a bailiff, or even demanding ransoms by claiming he had kidnapped the relatives of hospital workers. He had been arrested in December 2019 at the Tivoli amusement park in Copenhagen, having spent the previous months moving between Malta, Germany and Denmark.

Even when he was arrested and referred to a psychological examination by request of the public prosecutor, he was said to have deceived the psychologist by fabricating a disorder in a bid to receive a lower sentence. A court report seen by MaltaToday states he had been previously diagnosed with a form of autism and had already been involved in scams in his high school years.